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Website
maintenance helps keep your website at the top of the results by...
Preventing
website wear out
Websites
that don't change over time become stale. Just changing a few
words or sentences on a frequent basis can have a huge positive
effect on the success of your website marketing strategy; an
up-to-date, "fresh" website attracts customers and
reaffirms their faith in the validity of your product and or
services.
Confirming
usability
If
the site is difficult to understand or hard to navigate, visitors
usually leave. Also, research confirms that up to 27% of
visitors leave any site when they encounter a broken link or slow
pages. An outdated, irrelevant or unusable website is worse
than no website at all because it appears to reflect the owner's
indifferent attitude.
Ensuring
search engine compatibility
The
search engine spiders check such things as web page content, title
tags, metadata and image attributes. If any of these items
are missing, your website ranking could be compromised.
Checking
information currency
Prospects expect websites to be up-to-date, a source of current
company information. Because websites are easily changed,
prospects expect that websites WILL be updated with current
information. You want to eliminate any reasons for a prospect to
leave your website; it must be kept current.
Updating
search words
The
words that people use to search for goods and services change with
time. Search words change because of demographic variation,
language changes, vernacular or slang evolution or simply
because people happen to HEAR a new term. (This is called herding
behavior - no pun intended!) Whatever the reason, as the
search terms change, so must the words on your website so that
prospects continue to find your website! One of the biggest
reasons for a website maintenance program is to monitor the search
terms for your products or services.
Solution
The
easiest way to ensure regular content updates is establishing a monthly
maintenance contract. Typically, a retainer is a guarantee that
the maintenance firm you employ will invest a fixed amount of time
each month to update and refresh your website. Most maintenance
retainers start at 4-5 hours and can range up to 15 hours per month.
Again, your needs and budget will dictate the number of maintenance
hours you will require.
How
much maintenance is enough?
Website
maintenance is a critical part of your marketing strategy. But how
much website maintenance is enough, and what kind of maintenance do
you need? To answer
these questions, consider the following issues.
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Target
audience
Who
is going to be looking at your site? Consumers need to see
more change than more sophisticated B2B prospects. Are you
attempting to target new audiences? |
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Amount
of information
The
more information on your website, the more time is necessary
to keep it up-to-date. |
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Changes
to your product or service
What
are you selling, and how often does your offering change or
expand? Do you have any special offers that appear or change
throughout the year? |
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Long
term strategy
Your
maintenance plan is essentially a business plan for your
website. It should include some provision for your long term
website development strategy. All too often, businesses
consider maintenance as an afterthought-something to be taken
care of as time allows and with whatever budget is remaining.
Make this mistake, and you'll be playing catch-up for the
duration of your site's existence. |
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Seasonality
Does
your product or service have a yearly (or monthly or weekly)
sales ebbs and flows? Even if your product DOESN'T have a
natural periodicity, you can create one at various times
throughout the year in order to entice prospects. The airlines
have sales, grocery stores have loss leaders, and you can
have them, too! |
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Budget
The
maintenance program must match your budget. For budgeting
purposes, most website optimization firms offer maintenance
packages that range from 2 to 15 hours per month. |
What maintenance is included?
As
a rule, maintenance includes reporting, and optionally can include
repair and research. Reporting: site error scan for missing critical
elements, including title tags, metadata, image attributes;
identification of out-dated and problem content; reporting all
problem pages with the detailed breakdown of problems by page;
evaluate site quality and usability; measure site down time (hosting
servers can periodically fail); repairing all errors found on the
pages. Research search terms and change existing pages and recommend
(and design) new pages.
How
to start
Take
a look at the following programs and find one that's right for you.
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Maintenance 1:
(Report) site error scan for missing critical elements,
including title tags, metadata, image attributes;
identification of out-dated and problem content; reporting all
problem pages with the detailed breakdown of problems by page;
evaluate site quality and usability. Typically 2-5 hours per
month. |
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Maintenance 2: (Report
and repair) includes maintenance 1, plus measuring site down
time, repairing all errors found on the pages and
uploading revised pages. Typically 6-9 hours per month. |
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Maintenance 3: (Report,
research and repair) includes maintenance 1, plus measuring
site down time, repairing all errors found on the pages, word
search, identify new or changed search terms, update page(s)
text, recommend new pages and publish the revised pages.
Typically 10-12 hours per month. |
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2005 Web-Writer